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This paper presents a study of Indian media. Utilizing the Propaganda Model formulated by Herman and Chomsky in the book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media (1988), the paper aims to critically assess the news patterns and media performance of the mainstream Indian media. The contribution of the paper will be the application of the propaganda model in the context of Indian media. For this study, we have analyzed the media coverage of two events – India's ban on Chinese apps and the Pulwama attack. We focus on how Indian Media has helped the Government to establish the propaganda of nationalism during both events, which is explained by Herman and Chomsky in the five filters of news production. We investigate how the anti-China sentiment and the Pulwama attack have been used by the Government to divert attention from their failure of governance, and mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic. The corporate media is playing its part in the machinations of the ruling BJP party. We conclude that the plurality of voices amongst journalists is in decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The challenge that the COVID-19 pandemic has posed to the extant socio-economic and political system had created a degree of disjunct that may be more difficult to reconcile without significant paradigmatic and concomitant policy change. While this question applies to the entire world, the present special issue is focused on rethinking some select facets of these questions in the Indian context. In doing so, the papers presented here locate the crisis that has been exacerbated by the pandemic in the longer contextual experience of their relevant area and reflect on some possibilities for the post-COVID-19 era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The push for digital technologies during the Covid-19 pandemic has put a question mark on the relationship between the state and society in India. In particular, it has highlighted the gap between the lofty promises of digital welfare by political leaders and businesses, and the widespread discontent with digitalization as evident on the ground. In this paper, I take this gap as a starting point to conceptualize the nature of politics in the data state, drawing on Polanyian themes to understand how the contentions are gradually "embedding" the digital economy in society. Tracing the arc of the interactions between domestic ideas, interests and institutions alongside the development of digital capitalism, I also show that caught in these entanglements, digital economy can no longer remain a one-way street for data "extraction". More specifically, I argue that at the end of its first decade of since the emergence of surveillance capitalism in 2010s, politics has ensured that it confronts ground level resistance that revolves around themes of inclusion, welfare and pluralism rather than the liberal conceptions of privacy and individual consent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Covid-19 pandemic of 2020-21 has acted as an inflection point, exposing the fragility of liberal democracy in India, already beleaguered by the rise of majoritarian populism since 2014, buttressed by a process of expansion of bureaucratic power and autocratic legalism while marginalizing the processes of political accountability – étatisation, and normalization of state violence. The combined impact of such developments has been an erasure of basic rights to life and livelihood for the poor, rooted not only in state incapacity but also in state acquiring impunity for its acts of coercion and violence against its own citizens. Many of these processes have come into stark focus during the Covid-19 pandemic, but have longer histories and are likely to have impact far beyond the pandemic. The paper examines some of these processes with the help of three interlinked but conceptually distinct strands: (a) étatisation and suspension of politics; (b) (en)forcement of a new normal during the health emergency; and (c) erasure of right to life and livelihood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]